Reviewed for H-Albion by Marilyn Morris <mmorris@unt.edu>, Department of
History, University of North Texas

Reading these two treatments of English national identity concurrently prompts
one to reach for the game-show denouement: "Will the real English please stand
up." J.C.D. Clark's English emerge as a people whose lives revolve around an obsession
with Christian dogma and ecclesiastical practice. Paul Langford's English, in
contrast, are a study in contradictions -- industrious yet leisured; candid and
hypocritical; individualistic, eccentric, and free spirited yet slaves to custom;
informal but stiff; domestic, unsociable, and taciturn yet clubbable; barbaric
and polite -- in fine, only consistent in their unpredictability.

Clark unravels the tangle of history and ideas that he sees as having formed the
English's orderly corporate capacity, while Langford rolls out an unwieldy mess
of individual traits attributed to the English by contemporary, primarily foreign,
observers and tries to find some ordering principle therein. Neither, for different
reasons, actively places his study within the context of current historical controversies.
Each book attempts to stand apart like the kingdom on the sea that it seeks to
represent, so being thrown together in a review is a bit like having a reminder
of close neighbors whom one hopes to dominate but who nevertheless express an
inconveniently divergent perspective.

Clark's second, revised edition of English Society, presents the same model
of an old regime that survived until 1832, but employs new tactics and strategy
in response to the considerable critical reaction that his first edition provoked.
Whereas in 1985 he directed his full artillery against historians whom he perceived
propped up Whiggish or Marxian paradigms, he now tactically eschews any sort of
direct engagement. Clark rounds up selected opposition into one footnote prefaced,
"However one might debate particular conclusions, in no sense is the present book
an implied dismissal of the research agendas embodied in a wide range of recent
studies," then concludes coyly, "Nor is it merely the intention of the present
book to fill in gaps in that historiography" (p. 38). His only citations to other
works point to particular passages that support his arguments. As for his larger
strategy, Clark moves his starting date back from 1688 to 1660 in order to underline
the continuity of the long eighteenth century, and builds his model of English
society in a language he has sought to cleanse of anachronism, prolepsis, and
teleology. Indeed, he deploys entries from Johnson's Dictionary in the way that
eighteenth-century polemicists wielded scripture. Ancien rgime, patriarchalism,
paternalism, and consensus follow radicalism, liberalism, and other abstract nouns
sent into banishment in the first edition. The nineteenth century's polarizing
labels, he argues, obscured "the middle ground of English life: that social form
which presented itself as both constitutional and royalist, libertarian
and stable, tolerant and expressing religious orthodoxy, innovative
and respectful of what was customary" (p. 17).

Clark describes how the conflicts of the seventeenth century shaped a Protestant
constitution supported by an Anglican-aristocratic hegemony, the idea of divine
Providence, and a national identity centered in a strong monarchy. It was religious
dissent, Catholic Emancipation, and repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts that
destroyed this order and brought parliamentary reform, not those collective hallucinations
of hindsight that historians dubbed the Industrial Revolution and the rising middle
class. Increased mobility, Clark maintains, was geographic rather than social.
The notion of urbanization as an agent of change, however, he finds equally phantasmagoric,
as English people of all classes long lived an amphibious existence between town
and country. Class had more to do with the duties of one's station than one's
economic position. All activities, including political opposition, were subsumed,
and thus tamed, within the Anglican framework and the gentlemanly ethos underlying
the social hierarchy. Clark prefers to use the word disaffected rather than radical
to describe opponents of the old order before the 1820s, lacking as they did a
theory of natural rights.

While for Clark, English identity lies in religion, Langford's foreign observers
suggest that the English passion for politics and commerce is the key to understanding
their manners and character. In fact, Continental travelers observed the English
to be phlegmatic, even irreverent and fickle, in their devotions. Practicality,
rather than devoutness, appeared to be the English modus operandi. How
else to explain an extreme and stultifyingly dull Sabbatarianism than a means
of recovering after a week of energetic industry, considering that most of those
observed spent the better part of the day in a roast-dinner induced stupor?

The pictures that Clark and Langford present do converge in their depictions of
the social utility of politeness and manners. Langford's evidence suggests that
a man's political "radicalism" would be tolerated as a harmless eccentricity as
long as he continued a suitable dinner companion, while indecorous religious enthusiasm
marked one as a public menace. Langford's data, however, shows patrician hegemony
under threat as early as the 1770s. While Clark sees social emulation, moral criticism
of aristocratic values, and diatribes against social interlopers as evidence of
the success of elite control, Langford finds evidence of increasing social anxiety
in the upper ranks from the 1770s manifested in their increasing self-isolation
through heightened reserve, snobbishness, and exclusivity. "The 'cut' as a weapon
of social warfare was invented in the 1770s" (p. 263).

Each of Langford's chapters focuses on one of the six traits that dominate characterizations
of Englishness: energy, candor, decency, taciturnity, reserve, and eccentricity.
He discusses the contexts in which these traits appear and the explanations that
observers of everyday English habits offer in their interpretation. Although the
book offers fascinating depictions of manners and mores from the mid-seventeenth
to mid-nineteenth centuries, the anecdotal material overwhelms his analysis. The
irritatingly fatuous drawings at the beginning of each chapter, best described
as caricatures of period caricatures, seem deliberately calculated to reassure
the sort of general reader who immediately relegates anything carrying the least
taint of academic seriousness to the realm of the boring. I cannot imagine why
Langford did not instead include visual satire in his analysis, given his previous
research on political prints. Nonetheless, he does succeed in his first aim of
bringing to light new material on observed rather than prescriptive behavior as
a foil to didactic literature and advice manuals. His second aim, to contribute
to current debate on the history of identity, requires readers to perform their
own analyses of his data. Although he sometimes points out the biases of his observers,
his presentation of foreigners as impartial spectators, even when supplemented
by opinions of English contemporaries themselves, seems a bit reductive. In many
instances, foreigners describing English peculiarities appeared to be using them
either as a flattering glass or a flaw-finding dressing room mirror. Relating
these constructions of national character to current debates on the roots of English
nationalism would have made for a more academically interesting book but would
have undermined its popular accessibility.

It is interesting how often in these two very different studies interpretation
rests upon etymological judgments. Clark insists that historians have been led
astray by Whig caricature of the Tory doctrine of passive obedience as meaning
complete submission. He explains that it delineated a middle ground between obedience
and resistance "what is today called civil disobedience, patiently accepting any
penalties for inactivity" (p. 58). Coupled as the doctrine was with that of non-resistance
(see for example the Bishop of Chichester's deathbed declaration of 1689 reproduced
on p. 85), this seems a teleological slip. The OED defines civil disobedience
as "the refusal to obey laws, pay taxes, etc., as part of a political campaign"
which is a very different thing indeed from its first definition of passive obedience
as "a surrender to another's will without cooperation." To my mind, disobedience
requires visible resistance, and passive obedience lies closer in meaning to dissimulation:
outwardly complying while inwardly resisting. In contrast to Clark's rigid pinning
down of meanings, Langford emphasizes the instability of the words used to describe
English traits and behavior as the source of their significance. "It is in the
ambiguities of these characterizations and in the evolving purposes they served,
that some of the most interesting features of perception and self perception are
to be found" (p. 27).

These divergent approaches to national identity do call into question the notion's
value as a category of historical analysis. Langford considers it significant
as a preoccupation of the time, a manifestation of Enlightenment social science.
Yet I cannot help but wonder whether both works are counterblasts to the campaign
for a British history that incorporates the experience of the Welsh, Scots, and
Irish. The two studies do agree in one respect: that constant negotiation, compromise,
and definition were a feature of English society. Perhaps historians should not
be so resistant to the linguistic turn.

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